You are listening to the War on the Rocks podcast on strategy, defense, and foreign affairs.

I'm Nick Danforth and I'm here with Mike Kaufman for the latest on Ukraine.

A brief note, we recorded this show around 2 p.m. on Friday, and there's been a lot of news out of Russia since then.

We're watching to see how it all develops and we'll record a new show as necessary.

Welcome to the podcast.

Great, thanks for hosting my regular podcast with Ryan.

It's been about three weeks since this started the offensive.

Last time we spoke, you said it was too early to tell how things were going.

So far it doesn't necessarily look great. Is that is that

fair to say? Is that your interpretation? So I think it's been long enough to

definitely have some early impressions and as best I can tell it's looking like it's going quite slower than many

had anticipated and clearly slower than Ukrainians themselves had hoped.

How do we know that?

Well, the Ukrainian president Zanski himself

had said this week that's going slower than expected.

So that's a good tall sign.

More importantly, I just don't think that this is where the Ukrainian general staff hoped they would be at this point.

That said, it's still fairly well within the balance of expectations and as I commented during our last

session on this podcast whose expectations right I think most analysts

assume this would be difficult it would be costly and probably be quite a bit more challenging than I hear so on a

and so far it is looking that way I'm always appreciate the fact that few plans

survive first contact with the enemy and don't necessarily survive the initial assumptions that they're based on either.

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